Stewart Lee's Recommended Reading List

Dear ATPunter

It would greatly improve your experience of the Prestatyn weekend if you were to speedread the following ten texts in preparation.

Kathryn Ferry - Holiday Camps

Ferry's pocket guide will give you cultural and historical context for the venue. At ATP at Camber Sands Pontins in 2001, Mark Shippy of Chicago's US Maple asked me, genuinely, if Pontins was some kind of internment centre for young offenders. He failed to understand the British holiday camp experience. I, however, have entered trivia quizzes at Butlins Minehead both as a genuine child and a genuine adult ATP attendee.

John Cale - What's Welsh For Zen

Bone up on the Welsh godfather of all the music you love headlining the festival that stole his song title on the shores of his native land.

Dan Rhodes - The Professor Who Got Stuck In The Snow / Timoleon Vieta Come Home

Dan Rhodes is my favourite living writer. I met him through a Giant Sand bootleg trade in the early '90s and he turned me on to the 13th Floor Elevators, both of whom are here. The Professor Who Got Stuck In The Snow is his latest, and hilarious, satire of belief and scepticism. Timoleon Vieta is the best of his back catalogue. The reclusive Rhodes will be reading and speaking here.

Andy Miller - The Year Of Reading Dangerously

Andy Miller's The Year Of Reading Dangerously asks what the role of reading is in the modern world, and he will be hosting his Read Yourself Fitter workshop in order to help you to read too.

Dave Graney - 101 Australian Nights, An Aesthetic Memoir

Dave Graney and The Mistly have come over from Melbourne to play, and the veteran Australian auteur's book is an arch manual on the art of the nature of the performer that both inspired and comforted me.

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin - The Art of Smallfilms

DJ, cratedigger, critic and curator Jonny Trunk is all over this festival. Here's a book he edited compiling the archive of the quintessentially British children's TV creators Postgate and Firmin, outsider artists who chose kids' telly as their medium for subversion. I wrote the introduction for it. We will be screening the duo's classic Clangers series on Saturday and Sunday morning. Oddly, a character in Dan Rhodes' Timeleon Vieta Come Home appears to be at least partly based on Clangers composer Vernon Elliot.

Paul Drummond - Eye Mind, Roky Erickson And The 13th Floor Elevators

Drummond's book is the definitive Erickson study. Roky himself will be reliving the music of the Elevators live, something which none of us ever thought we'd see, surely?

Stewart Lee - How I Escaped My Certain Fate

This is my book, by me, which I wrote, about stand-up, and it steals its title from a song by Mission of Burma, who are playing this weekend.

Bridget Christie - A Book For Her

This is Bridget's book, about stand-up and feminism, by her, which she wrote, and she will be talking about it live on stage to Andy Miller.